Social media marketing has a long and interesting history that includes the rise of new social media sites and the continual changes in business strategies. The area has grown at an amazing rate since it began, as shown by the fact that social attachments can be used as marketing strategies. The social media marketing timeline shows how the process changed over time, from simple chats on Friendster and MySpace to data-driven strategies on TikTok and Instagram shaped by social media algorithms.
In 1971, Kotler and Zaltman talked about how different social marketing is and how it “needs some new thinking, some new approaches.” This idea presented a quick summary of how social media marketing works in ways that are unique to it as a medium that has taken over the internet. Today, we’ll look at the history of social media marketing and talk about its ups and downs over the years. Daniel Clark, a member of Social Champ, says that consumers spend more than two hours a day on these sites on average.
Personal relationships
This shows that social media has a big effect on how people shop. The industry has changed throughout time to accommodate the needs of a worldwide audience that is becoming more connected and tech-savvy. For example, Facebook introduced professional pages in 2007, and influencer marketing and augmented reality have become more popular.
Friendster and MySpace were the first websites to let people make social relationships online in the 2000s. This was the start of social media advertising.
Friendster was one of the first social networks to get international notice. It was first released in 2002 and let users make profiles and talk to their friends. MySpace emerged next in 2003, and when millions of people signed up, it became easier to change. Brands paid attention and wanted to interact with users on these new social media sites. Facebook changed the game in 2004 when it first became a popular site for students. By 2006, it had grown to fit everyone. When Twitter originally came out in 2006, it let businesses talk to each other in real time and swiftly respond to customer questions. The rise of these new platforms showed how swiftly social media grew during this time.
Relevance of interests
For example, when Google bought YouTube in 2006, it turned the video material into a significant marketing tool in the late 2000s. After Instagram came out in 2010, pictures and videos were more important to the story. With the introduction of advertising technologies like Facebook ads (2007) and promoted tweets on Twitter (2010), businesses could target social media users even more accurately. As social media platforms have changed, so have marketing methods. Government commercials can’t just be a text message anymore.
They need to adopt more advanced methods like working with influencers, targeting people based on information, and making content just for them. It is everything that helps organizations get the most out of their campaigns, such complex algorithms and analytic dashboards. This is why social media marketing is the foundation of most digital strategies today and why it is always coming up with new ideas. In the early 1970s, Gerald Zaltman and Philip Kotler came up with the term “social marketing” to describe the idea of using marketing to change social behaviors for the good of society (Social Marketing: An Approach To Planned Social Change).
Probability of engagement
At the time, this was a groundbreaking idea because people wanted to utilize the same sales strategies that businesses use to market their products to solve problems like keeping people healthy, safeguarding the environment, and teaching people. Most of the campaigns were built on their deep understanding of what would work best for a certain group of people, so the messages provided would speak to them individually. The efforts included things like getting people to smoke less, save water, and get vaccinated.
These programs, which have been done in more traditional ways like public service announcements, community gatherings, and posters, have shown how important target communication is. These new ideas were the building blocks of the modern social media marketing industry. Understanding the target audience, their behavior, making meaningful connections, and getting people to act after reading an emotionally charged, well-designed message are still very important. In the last couple decades, social media marketing has gone from a simple online community to a more sophisticated and changing way to reach people.
Conclusion
Direct online social networks initially appeared at the end of the 1990s, when Six Degrees came out in 1997. It also let users talk to each other and share profiles, which set the stage for what would become a worldwide trend. In the late 1990s, when online engagement was still new, businesses didn’t completely understand how useful internet platforms could be for marketing. Friendster came out in 2002 and MySpace came out in 2003. The platforms put a lot of emphasis on personalizing and building relationships with people.
As people became more interested in making their own communities and profiles, brands learned their roles online by trying out making profiles and publishing small updates. The main topic of the decade was finding out how the internet could link people, and corporations took a risk by using social media to market their products. The last part of the 2000s was a time of change because of Facebook. In 2007, Facebook made business pages and advertising capabilities available. This changed the way businesses talk to their customers.